Thread by @robkhenderson

Explaining Postmodernism excerpts

"postmodernism holds that it is impossible to speak about an independently existing reality..substitutes instead a social-linguistic,constructionist account..denies that reason is a means of acquiring objective knowledge" amzn.to/3fkeMNb

"Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist...consistently emphasize relations of conflict...postmodern accounts hold that those conflicts are resolved primarily by the use of force, whether masked or naked" amzn.to/2C2tl9O

"objectivity is replaced by the view that an author’s race, sex, or other group membership most deeply shapes the author’s views and feelings. The task of the literary critic, accordingly, is to deconstruct the text to reveal the author’s race, sex, or class interests."

"The law is a weapon to be used in the social arena of subjective conflict, an arena driven by competing wills and the coercive assertion of one group’s interests over those of other groups." amzn.to/2C2tl9O

"In education, postmodernism rejects that the purpose of education is to train a child’s capacity for reason..Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity"

"Principles of civility and procedural justice serve as masks for hypocrisy and oppression born of asymmetrical power relations, masks that must be ripped off by crude verbal and physical weapons: ad hominem argument, in-your-face shock tactics, and equally cynical power plays."

"Disagreements are met not with argument, the benefit of the doubt, and the expectation that reason can prevail but with assertion, animosity, and a willingness to resort to force." amzn.to/2C2tl9O

"With no objective standard by which to mediate different perspectives and feelings, and with no appeal to reason possible, group conflict must necessarily result...having abandoned peaceful conflict resolution, prudence will dictate that only the most ruthless will survive."

"the persistent postmodernist charge that epistemology is merely a tool of power, that all claims of objectivity and rationality mask oppressive political agendas." amzn.to/2C2dHLE

"A related puzzle is explaining why postmodernists— particularly among those postmodernists most involved with the practical applications of postmodernist ideas, are the most likely to be hostile to debate, and the most likely to use anger and rage as argumentative tactics"

"Reason, according to Rousseau, is opposed to compassion: Reason generates civilization, which is the ultimate cause of the sufferings of the victims of inequality, but reason also then creates rationales for ignoring that suffering. 'Reason is what engenders egocentrism'"

"for all of their differences, both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, its optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups"

Collectivism among Counter-Enlightenment thinkers

Kant: Individuals must sacrifice for the species

Herder: Individuals must find identity in their ethnicity

Fichte: Education must involve total socialization

Hegel: Total government to which individuals must completely submit

"Hitler declared 'basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.' Goebbels’s hatred of capitalism was legendary, as was his hatred of money. Money, he wrote, is 'the source of all evil.'" amzn.to/3dZZlcK

"making the members of the proletariat wealthy enough to become comfortable, capitalism had created a captive class...It would be better if the proletariat were in economic misery under capitalism, for then they would realize their oppression and perform their historical mission"

"Language is the center of postmodern epistemology...to most postmodernists, language is primarily a weapon...words are merely tools in the power struggle for dominance" amzn.to/3fkeMNb

Contradictory discourses as political strategy

-All truth is relative, postmodernism tells it like it really is

-All values are subjective, sexism and racism are uniquely evil

-Technology is bad and destructive, it's unfair that some have more technology than others

Michel Foucault (most cited academic of all time): “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy.” amzn.to/3fkeMNb

"Deconstruction theory says that no work has meaning. Any apparent meaning can be transformed into its opposite, into nothing, or revealed to be a mask for something distasteful. The postmodern movement contains many people who like deconstructing other people’s creative work."

"The best target to attack is the Enlightenment’s sense of its own moral worth. Undermine its confidence in its reason, science and technology. The words do not even have to be true or consistent to do the necessary damage" amzn.to/2BVuv6P